Human Sister

across the vineyards, across the Sierra Nevadas, over the Rockies and the checkerboard garden of the Midwest, across the wide ocean and green England, and in through Elio’s open bedroom window. From there, he and I had zoomed and floated and fluttered, peeking our heads out over the leaf’s edges to see the Alps, the Bosporus, and the Himalayas before returning to Amsterdam as the time for Aunt Lynh to return home from work drew near.
    After only a couple of weeks’ practice, I was able to go from normal consciousness to self-induced hypnosis in less than ten seconds. When fully hypnotized, awareness of my breathing—slow, deep, and relaxed—was the only salient thing in my consciousness. I could hear Grandpa and was aware of what he was doing, but such awareness seemed faint and disconnected from me.
    Before the algetor was completed, Grandpa tested my reactions to various stimuli. In one test, I submerged my hand and forearm into a tub of ice water. Without hypnosis, I managed the pain, which became fairly intense within a minute, by focusing on the stinging and aching sensations and treating them as harmless, interesting curiosities, just as Grandpa had taught me to do years before. But with self-induced hypnosis, my experience of the ice water was different. I was aware that my arm had been placed in cold water, but I was only vaguely aware of the stinging and aching sensations, which seemed not to be affecting my arm but rather someone else’s arm that had been submerged in the water.
    I asked Grandpa whether there wasn’t a contradiction between what he’d taught me before—to go to the painful sensations and experience them fully—and what he was trying to teach me with hypnosis: to dissociate myself from the sensations of pain. He said that though the lessons taught two distinct methods of dealing with pain, the lessons were complementary, not contradictory. He reminded me that our bodies had evolved in a world devoid of man-made optical illusions and pain inducers, just as the ideas of Newtonian mechanics had evolved in an experiential world devoid of extremely small objects moving at extremely high speeds; and that just as Newtonian theory had failed for the extremely small and the extremely speedy, so our senses and emotions failed in many artificially imposed conditions.
    He had me read a passage on reflex actions from Darwin’s 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals :

    I put my face close to the thick glassplate in front of a puff-adder in the Zoological Gardens, with the firm determination of not starting back if the snake struck at me; but, as soon as the blow was struck, my resolution went for nothing, and I jumped a yard or two backwards with astonishing rapidity. My will and reason were powerless against the imagination of a danger which had never been experienced.

    Grandpa explained that Darwin’s experience with the puff adder presented an example of how our evolved senses and emotive systems deform heights, widths, distances, light intensities, and dangers, leading us humans to misconstrue reality and sometimes to take inappropriate and potentially dangerous actions.
    “What would have happened to poor Mr. Darwin,” Grandpa asked, “had there been an exposed high-voltage wire a meter behind him as he faced the puff adder with his firm determination not to jump back from what he knew to be illusory danger?”
    “That would have been bad.”
    “Yes. Probably his widow and fatherless children would have preferred he face the terrible snake with a self-hypnotic suggestion not to jump back, rather than with his feeble determination.”
    “Didn’t Darwin know about hypnosis?”
    “I don’t know whether he did. But we do, and we can put that knowledge to good use. The algetor will be complete in two or three days. Remember, it’s nothing more than a sophisticated producer of illusions. A special helmet will cover your head so that you’ll be able to see and hear only what the operator of the algetor wants you to see and hear. Various parts of your body will be wrapped in banded strips of microsensors and stimulators. You’ll be told that unless you talk, the knife with the sharp, cold blade scraping over your leg will be jabbed deep into your thigh and twisted mercilessly. You’ll feel the cold, hard steel on your thigh. You’ll feel its sharp edge. You’ll be ordered to answer, but you’ll remain silent. Then you’ll experience excruciating pain as